They Menace

New Look at Those Migratory Birds They Menace mall Atolls?

this age of jets, sputniks,

luclear power, the birds migrate back and forth the Pacific as regularly as Jasons, and some of the

ations of their mysterious

ngs, are apt to be over 1.

CNT medical research has is e d strong grounds for ;picion that some of these are the carriers of scrub into New Guinea and North ;land from Asia. The World Organisation, as a result of ispicion, has launched a re project into their move and the possibility of their ig other diseases from point to n other parts of the world. research might have par bearing on certain Pacific ; groups where, almost un l, these birds fly in to rest brief interval before setting i the next stage of their al voyaging, or remain for a seks or months to breed. : can be shown that these rs are disease carriers they a real menace to the tions of very small islands oils.

Another Factor e is another factor here which rhaps been overlooked by even who have offered the most opposition to the Pacific r bomb tests, and which also be of particular interest to atolls of the Marshalls —in- ? Bikini and Eniwetok—and mas and Malden are all stag rounds for migratory birds, illy the birds on Bikini and :ok at the actual time of the explosions were completely out, as were the birds on n when the first British H was fired above that atoll, what about all the birds that through the radio-active area e especially the Marshall s area—in subsequent weeks those atolls were still “hot”, ich flew through radio-active nes far from the atolls? se badly irradiated would have

died —but perhaps not before they had bred, or before they had travelled to distant lands.

Were they a source of danger to man, or other birds with which they roosted later? A study of their off spring, too —the birds that are now following the same age-old paths each year—might prove interesting.

What mutations have taken place?

Has a new breed of godwit and golden plover and pin-tailed duck been produced as a result, per haps with entirely different characteristics?

Staging Point

Only the ornithologists can say, but a close examination of the sand pipers and godwits and mutton birds and other varieties which summer in the Southern Hemis

phere might prove worth while from a scientific point of view.

Malden is used by plovers migrat ing to Tahiti, the Cooks and New Zealand from Alaska. The records also show that small numbers of pin-tail ducks used to come to that atoll for a few weeks each No vember-December, from the United States. Some of these moved on south to Penrhyn atoll.

Small rookeries of several varieties of terns, gannets, frigate birds and tropic birds bred there and some of these, too, though not migratory, would range to nearby populated atolls —Fanning, the Northern Cooks, and the Marquesas, perhaps.

It seems probable that all these birds may come under a good deal closer scrutiny as a result of the WHO project and the publicity which it obtains.